Monday, August 11, 2014

:… the collapse of Iraq had
created a refugee crisis, and that crisis was threatening to precipitate the
collapse of the region. The numbers dwarfed anything that the Middle East had
seen since the dislocations brought on by the establishment of Israel in 1948.
In Syria, there were estimated to be 1.2 million Iraqi refugees. There were
another 750,000 in Jordan, 100,000 in Egypt, 54,000 in Iran, 40,000 in Lebanon
and 10,000 in Turkey. The overall estimate for the number of Iraqis who had
fled Iraq was put at two million.”

The NYT today is very worried that if the US doesn’t act, a humanitarian
crisis will erupt in Iraq. The cause of the crisis is Isis. And yet, my quote
from the Times is not from today – no, it is from May 13, 2007. At that time,
Iraq was suffering from a bigger invasion force than any mounted by Isis. The
force was called the US Military. They’d been sowing chaos and massacre for
four years by this time, and yet there seemed to be no call going out there
from any of the major thumbsuckers to bomb Washington D.C. until they withdrew.

Funny that, eh?

I’ve been surprised – which shows how dumb I am – how quickly the hawk
narrative has caught on among the punderati, the VSPs. In another recent
opinion page piece, the NYT invited seven
figures to debate the question: Is it right that the United States become more
involved militarily in Iraq? Of course, this is a question no Iraqi
could handle, which is why the seven respondents were all american, with one
Iranian american thrown in for good measure.
Two were women who’d been involved in the Bush end of the war on terror,
from the perspective of which they could suggest ample measures to make
American policy in the Middle East even more of a fucking disaster than it is
now.

Because America thirsts for good guys before they pay for
bloodshed – as every summer action flick shows – the Kurds have been amped up
as the good guys of the moment. I was surprised and pleased to see Steve Coll
push back against this meme in a recent New Yorker piece – perhaps stimulated
by his colleague Dexter Filkin’s neo-connish rants about Iraq, and Obama’s
incredible failure to plunge into the country as into an inviting swimming pool – one filled with blood! - with
soldiers galore – such fun it was the last time!

It has been 11 years since the US, under a criminally
negligent president, invaded and occupied Iraq, with results that we can all
see. And yet, incredibly, the same old krewe of morons that urged that
adventure are now popping up all over the media to urge another. It is a sign
of what a sclerotic plutocracy America has become – its elites learn nothing.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.